Grounds Crews Tested This Winter

Northern Michigan University grounds crews have confronted their most challenging winter in years, as they've had to clear higher snowfall amounts generated by bigger storms, including the three forecasted this week. With no more room to pile it in some areas, they have also had to take the rare step of transporting it to other campus locations. This is also a record-setting winter for university closures due to inclement weather.

"The challenge with frequent and larger storms is that it takes exponentially longer to clear," said Grounds Supervisor Andrew Smith. "You have to make several more passes because it rolls off the edges of the plow. We're also running out of room to put it because we can only push the banks back so far. For the first time in my nine years at Northern, we've had to bucket snow and move it in a dump truck from the Northern Center parking lot to behind the Superior Dome for longer-term storage. If we hadn't had a minor thaw in January and a couple warm days leading up to this week, we'd be in big trouble.

"Because we've been so busy clearing active snowfalls this season, we haven't had as much of a chance to perform routine post-storm cleanup, such as pushing back snowbanks, stacking snow and re-scraping parking lots down to the pavement. But I still believe Northern has the cleanest sidewalks and roadways in the county. It's a credit to our crews, who spend hours bouncing along in a front-end loader trying to avoid pedestrian and vehicle traffic. It's a stressful job, but I remind the staff that most people genuinely appreciate their effort."

Smith said another impact of so many active snows is that those accompanied by high winds cause heavy drifting on campus, making it more difficult to detect the edges of landscape structures. Some that have been inadvertently bumped will have to be repaired this summer. Grounds crew members report to work between 4-5 a.m. all winter long, Smith said. He arrives even earlier, especially on days that snow is expected.

NMU Police Chief Mike Bath, who is also up early to monitor winter storms, has kept track of inclement weather closures of the university. He reports there have been seven weekdays affected so far this winter; one was only for the afternoon the day before Thanksgiving. There were also seven weekday closures in 2018-2019, but two of those were for evening classes only, so more total time has been impacted this year.